Marcella kept whispering. “At least now we know—Vitellius doesn’t want Diana for himself, or his officers wouldn’t dare set their caps at her. I think that’s what maddened Tullia the most. She had such a touching little dream of Vitellius divorcing that meek wife of his and making Diana Empress instead.” Marcella glanced at the Emperor, ruddy-faced and roaring with laughter in the Imperial box just one row away, surrounded by his officers. Properly men and women sat apart at the theater, but Diana had the stool at his feet as she always did these days, and Vitellius’s heavy drink-reddened face was tilted down toward the little blond head. “I could have told Tullia he wasn’t interested in Diana that way. He might pat her hips now and then when he’s drunk—but since when is a man like Vitellius really interested in anything besides eating, throwing up, and watching the Blues win?” Marcella cast her eyes up to the heavens. “And that’s our Emperor.”

Cornelia just nodded absently, and Marcella suppressed a sigh. She’d dragged her sister out to the theater that afternoon, hoping to give her a treat—Gaius and Tullia were still barely speaking to her, after all—and all Cornelia could do was twitch in her seat, fingers beating a restless tattoo on the ivory handle of her fan. It wasn’t like her, but everyone in Rome seemed overheated and distracted these days. Summer rolled toward September, scorching hot, bringing swirls of dust on the slightest breeze. Everyone groaned about the heat, spent hours in the natatio pools of the bathhouses, bemoaned their cool river villas in Toscana or Tivoli.

Everyone but me. Marcella felt cool as ice in all the heat, and she wouldn’t have left this boiling, bubbling, scheming city for all the gold in Egypt.

Her eyes drifted speculatively over to Vitellius again. She could hear his bull voice clearly over the declaiming of the actors—and even if he’d whispered, she thought she would have heard him. My ears can pick up every whisper in Rome, she sometimes thought.

“—those chestnut stallions of yours, the ones named after winds,” Vitellius was saying down to the little blond head at his side. “You’re afraid to stack them against my Blues!”

“Caesar,” Diana shot back, “your Blues are spavined cow-hocked mules compared to my Anemoi.” The other guests in the Imperial box exchanged glances—Marcella knew they couldn’t believe how freely Diana spoke her mind to the ruler of Rome. But Vitellius had spent a good many years as governor in rough places like Germania and Africa: he liked plain speaking, and he liked Diana. He roared laughter, and his friends were quick to laugh with him.

“You might think he’d be more worried,” Marcella mused aloud. “What with the news from Judaea . . .”

Cornelia blinked, drawn out of her reverie again. “Oh, that.”